The rules I described for cookies and candies in the previous sections apply
to ice cream, too:

Stick with ice cream from major manufacturers and carefully read the labels. Although ice cream produced in North America is rarely manufactured on dedicated peanut-free lines, I believe that ice cream from major manufacturers is generally safe. However, be careful of the small manufacturers — one study a few years ago of small ice cream manufacturers found that peanut contamination was quite common. Allergic reactions to peanut are rarely traced back to cross-contaminated ice cream from the major companies. You can call a company to learn more about how they handle and clean their equipment.

Make your own ice cream. Some patients decide that the only truly safe ice cream comes from their own ice cream maker in their own kitchen.

Avoid scooped ice cream from parlors. The ice cream reactions that allergists witness on a regular basis occur with scooped ice cream from ice cream parlors. As with candies and cookies, ice cream from parlors may contain undeclared peanut as an ingredient or, more often, become contaminated from shared ice cream scoops or nearby peanut toppings, At an ice cream shop, the server typically uses the same scoop for all the flavors, merely rinsing (not washing) it between orders. Once the server opens a container of ice cream and dips into it, you’re likely to be served a scoop of contaminated ice cream.

Avoid the soft serve parlor, too. Soft serve ice cream resolves the problem of the contaminated scoop, but it’s not a foolproof solution. Most soft serve shops regularly offer a peanut flavor as the flavor of the day. You may arrive at the shop elated to see that strawberry is today’s flavor of the day, but the shop may be dispensing today’s strawberry ice cream from yesterday’s peanut machine. Soft serve dispensers are extremely difficult to sanitize, and today’s ice cream is almost certainly contaminated by yesterday’s batch.

Skip the toppings. Almost every ice cream parlor on the planet has a can of chopped peanuts on hand. Watch the servers rush through a couple orders, and you quickly notice that the peanut sprinkles often fly into the chocolate syrup, hot fudge, and other toppings. Sometimes, the servers use the same spoon to sprinkle on different toppings. Topping dispensers that haven’t been property cleaned and sanitized between flavor changes can also cause problems.

Some resourceful patients bring their own scoop to the ice cream parlor to reduce the risk of cross contamination. However, unless the person behind the counter opens a new tub of ice cream for you to use with your nice clean scoop, this really is not a safe practice. I do have a few patients with peanut allergy who found local soft serve ice cream parlors where they were comfortable. They know that the chocolate or vanilla machine never handles any other flavor, watch the ice cream come out of the machine and into their cup, and simply avoid toppings altogether.

Related posts:

1. Peanut Allergy : Uncovering peanuts in candies
2. Peanut allergy : Peanut’s favorite hideouts
3. Peanut Allergy : Other baked goods
4. Peanut Allergy : Choosing a peanut-lite restaurant
5. Peanut Allergy : Steering Clear of the Other Nuts